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Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app

(www.zerosheets.com)
356 points joaovcoliveira | 2 comments | 12 Apr 24 16:29 UTC | HN request time: 0.645s | source

Hello everyone!

At a company I worked for, we needed to develop an MVP (basically a web page) and apply certain business logic to a Google Drive spreadsheet that was frequently updated by the Sales team.

In this case, we had two options:

Develop a backend to replace the current spreadsheet and have the sales team use it as a new "backoffice" - This would take a very long time, and if the hypothesis we were testing was wrong, it would be time wasted.

Create the web page and use Google's SDK to extract data from the spreadsheet.

We chose to go with the second option because it was quicker. Indeed, it was much faster than creating a new backoffice. But not as quick as we imagined. Integrating with Google's SDK requires some effort, especially to handle the OAuth logic, configure it in the console, and understand the documentation (which is quite shallow, by the way).

Anyway! We did the project and I realized that maybe other devs might have encountered similar issues. Therefore, I developed a tool that transforms Google spreadsheets into "realtime APIs" with PATCH, GET, POST, and DELETE methods.

Since it's a product for devs, I think it would be cool to hear your opinions. It's still quite primitive, but the basic features already work.

https://zerosheets.com

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zharknado ◴[13 Apr 24 02:50 UTC] No.40020060[source]▶
2 Google Sheets backend stories:

- Needed to manage vocab learning content for 60 world languages, mostly being updated by a handful of university students and a bunch of remote volunteers. Google Sheets was our source of truth, with a nightly sync into MariaDB. We even wrote some callable scripts that could detect ambiguities and other common issues. Saved us a ton of tooling effort, and stakeholders found it cool that we could update content so quickly.

- Working on a new product, my boss found a Figma plugin that lets you wire up prototypes to a Google sheet. It’s report-heavy and we’re still building the real app, so to dogfood it internally I’m running a wizard-of-oz collecting data with a different tool we already built and dumping results into sheets and then sorting/filtering/calculating for all the needed views. Internal stakeholders get a real, clickable prototype with real values that closely approximates what the real product will look like. It’s been amazing!

replies(1): >>40020284 #
1. Solvency ◴[13 Apr 24 03:40 UTC] No.40020284[source]▶
what Figma plug-in?
replies(1): >>40020496 #
2. bigfatfrock ◴[13 Apr 24 04:28 UTC] No.40020496[source]▶
Guessing: https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/735770583268406934/go...